Mittwoch, 16. Februar 2011

It's been a while since my last post on YUMA. For those not in the know: YUMA is our prototype annotation framework for online media. It's conceptual roots date back to the BRICKS and TELplus projects; and we're now developing it further as part of the EuropeanaConnect project. Over the last months, YUMA has received a considerable overhaul, so I thought I'd take the time and summarize some of the things that have been going on.

Faster

The old YUMA used to work with RDF/XML throughout. Since RDF/XML is quite a verbose format, internal communication became somewhat slow for objects with lots of annotations. With the current update, YUMA now speaks JSON for all internal data communication (yeah I know, how boring). The revised API still delivers RDF, of course, but in more flavours (XML, N3, Turtle); and a few additional tricks are planned for the near future!

Prettier

I introduced various CSS tweaks and beautification measures to nice-up the user interface. It's still not exactly an intuitive UI though, and nothing changed about the base layout, but hey - we're still in the 'tech demo' stage after all!

Smarter

One of the central ideas behind YUMA was always that users should be able to augment their annotations with structured semantics without effort. The new update brings (1) a demo for tagging based on a structured vocabulary with auto-suggestion text entry and a tree-view tag browser. It's currently based on only a single SKOS file from the DISMARC project, unfortunately, and should be considered very beta. (2) Dynamic tag suggestions from our controversial (yet highly eye-candy-ish) context tag cloud, based on the automatic text annotation feature of DBpedia Spotlight.

More Talkative

The new server infrastructure now provides a range of RSS feed options. It's possible to subscribe to the public annotation activity on a particular object, by a particular user, or follow the (public) replies on any annotation. In addition, there's a basic search interface, the public timeline, an OpenSearch API that is...well.. half done, and the early beginnings of generally-understandable documentation, including a sign of good will that we are happy to give support to those who are daring enought to test drive YUMA!